


The Bones of Lazarus

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Everybody Lives, Gen, Team as Family, chato is FINE he's FINE, rooftop drama, squad goals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-10 00:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7822645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chato Santana does not rest in peace. Men like him never can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Blood on my Name

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted found family fic and I wasn't finding much. Story title from [ this song ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh3JBB6la8w)

Maybe this is what Lazarus felt in the silence of the grave, before the voice of his friend dragged him back into the light.

Chato Santana has never known anything like the quiet of this void. Like a candle under a glass, he is dark and inert. What is not alive cannot be killed, cannot be hurt, wants for nothing. Where does the fire go when the glass comes down? He knows enough to know that nothing is ever really destroyed; it just changes shape, changes appearance, goes quiet. The void is a long sleep, late autumn in the air-conditioning, a house in the quiet suburbs. Chato was born hot and only grew hotter, tossing and turning on his mattress until he rolled onto the floor in a tangle of blankets. Blazing through the halls of two different high schools. Melting asphalt underneath his feet.

The profound peace of this non-world mutes even the memory of the wrongs he’s done. When he was twelve, Chato grabbed the big girl of a rival gang and charred her throat almost through, because she was alone in the wrong place at the wrong time and her boy had said something about his boys, and back then it had all seemed to have the sharp immediacy of knife to the back. For years the feeling of her bubbling skin against his hand had found him just as he was dropping into sleep, a wet phantom popping against his palms. For a decade he jerked awake with his teeth gritted, rasping his hands over the blankets to scrape the feeling off his skin. For a while his wife would try to catch them; she caught one between her own hands and rubbed soothingly, her palms too smooth and warm to do anything but amplify the memory. After the third or fourth time that Chato jerked free of her grip, she stopped trying to sooth him. She would have understood if he had let her. But even then, some part of him understood that he should be ashamed of what he had done.

In the nothingness that comes after, not even that memory can wake feeling into a body that no longer exists.

But men like him don’t rest in peace. He knows too well what he’s done, even if it’s muted and cooled at the end of all things. He’s not even surprised when the heat at last begins to creep back in. It comes in sparks at first, biting against the formless space that comprises him now. Once upon a time fire felt like a kind of victory, and now it feels like regret. Flash, spark: his heel against the skull of another boy who had wanted out. Flash, spark: crawling through his own window at four in the morning, bleeding into the sink while his wife sighs in her sleep, the excruciating artificial silence as he tries not to wake her. Flash: his hand closing around the column of a throat. Spark: skin bubbling, like nothing you’ve ever seen before, fat sizzling under the char.

Chato comes back to himself screaming, clawing at his hands and wrists as he burns—he never used to feel the heat, he used to _be_ the heat—and writhes on the ground. His cheek is leaving smears of blood on concrete as rough and pebbled as a demolition site.

He gasps, sucking in breath like a newborn, and thinks— _concrete_?

The burning he expected, but somehow he never expected Hell to be made of concrete. _Is_ it concrete? Maybe this is just whatever caverns are made of.

He opens one eye, fuzzy and wet, and manages to make out a chunk of concrete with the support rebars broken and curling up from the wreckage like exposed ribcages. Nope, it is definitely not a cavern.

Chato lies there panting and aching for a long time, in the rubble. His bleeding cheek stings. His burning limbs slowly cool, leaving behind a uniform kind of physical misery like the height of a nasty fever. Right down to the bones. He’s exhausted. He doesn’t understand why he’s lying here in the dark and the rubble, unless this is what Hell looks like for city boys like him. And it must, because this is no kind of Heaven, even if he was willing to entertain the idea that he could end up there. He feels old and used, like a pair of shoes that’s been worn too hard.

He looks blearily at the scorch marks on everything around him, and he thinks—did I do that?

He scrapes himself up off the ground, inch by aching inch, and peers over the rubble at the absolute devastation beyond, and he thinks—maybe not.

Is he alive? If he’s alive, are _they_ alive? And suddenly he’s on his feet, feeling nothing at all except icy terror as he scrambles over wreckage in search of human bodies. His nails rip on the edges of concrete shards too heavy to lift, as he claws through it for some sign of life. Here and there, the glint of empty shells. Broken red glass. When he killed his first family, the fire had burned so hot—the devastation had been so complete—there were no bodies, there was nothing at all by the time it was done. Ashes. Bones. The slagged hull of the gun safe.

At the very least, this time there could be bodies.

His hands are moving, but his mind is drifting, punch drunk, through a series of memories. In the prison yard, the whole crew, showing off their outfits on the sly, their eyes flicking from person to person to see who was impressed.

In the transport, Croc pressing his neighbor back into the seat as turbulence rattled them all down to their teeth.

In that endless, dawnless night, crouching behind the overturned belly of a car with Katana, her breathing calm and solid, her footing just a little bit wider than it needed to be, as if she was half shielding him from whatever lay beyond.

Finally, he uncovers the crushed remains of a tazer. Belle issue. He recognizes their kind. Flag’s goons. Somebody was dragged out of here by force, alive and whole enough to protest bodily the whole way. Chato breaks into heaving half-sobs and nearly tips over sideways as the panic that was keeping him upright drains away. If one of them is alive, they must have beaten the witch. She wouldn’t have left just one alive. Evidence suggests that Waller went back on her word, but Chato had never expected honor from a woman who carried a briefcase while she made someone else carry the gun.

He turns the crushed tazer over in his hands. Alive. Alive, and owed. Once upon a time Chato had gone to his own imprisonment with his head up, hands out, but the others—they deserved more. They were owed more. And Chato is the one, now, who will have to give it to them.  

He doesn’t know what kind of a life they can have together. _Together_ —he thinks, surprised by his own assumption. But there’s strength in numbers, as if this awful night hasn’t proven that enough for anyone. They fought together. They were a _team_ , Flag would say. They were a _family_ , Chato would say. His people, from the first gunshot. Waller wouldn’t understand what it means to be down in the dirt together, choosing to be there, but maybe Flag understands now.

Chato has done this before, and done it wrong. He had two families before—the brotherhood of the streets, fractious and angry, and they had all betrayed and stepped on each other as they scrambled for the top; his wife and his kids, trusting innocent, and he had burned them at every turn as he dragged them along towards the promise of Being Somebody.

Now he has this new family. They’re broken and ugly and they are his, as lonely and vulnerable as his children, as fierce and jaded as his boys.

If there’s a price to be paid for crawling like St. Lazarus from this concrete tomb, Chato will pay it in its due time. He suspects even now that there is something monstrous about himself that he doesn’t yet understand, powerful enough to go toe to toe with an old god and come out of it in one piece. There must be a thing inside of him that refuses to stay dead. He’ll worry about that when he has his people together again. Maybe they’ll own a neighborhood in LA. Maybe they’ll take back a chunk of Gotham. He’ll go wherever it is that they want to go.

First, he’s got to get them back.

Belle Reve lies in the squalid heart of a bayou far from anyone or anything worth knowing. Chato was born in LA, and before they dragged him down to the prison he’d never seen a swamp in the flesh. He’s wary. For all that he knows about the intricate web of territories and traps in Southern California, he knows absolutely nothing about snakes or quicksand or, when it comes down to it, Louisiana itself.

In Midway City he hears a rumor that there was work in Gotham, and he follows that down to the source—hangs around in the darkness there for a few months, building a nest egg, taking the most harmless jobs a guy with a face like his could find. Bodyguard work. Bouncer. Some small scale industrial work for an employer who wanted to keep off the grid. The life calls to him like the siren song of gravity, a wind sucking at his clothes as he crosses the endless tightrope. Cops, even Gotham cops, hate him on sight. White collar work was never even on the table. The constant shove from one door to another pushes him like an unwelcome pinball, and it’s enough to remind him in vivid detail why he started that doomed scramble for the top.

He’s chased off the premises at a chemical factory where he’s been told they’re always looking for new hires. He snatches open the top buttons of the nice shirt he’s bought, standing on the stoop of a corner store a few blocks away, and sizzles like his body is trying to burn away the oily residue of humiliation. It’s almost enough to break his resolve, maybe it would be, except that his wedding ring is still glinting on his finger as he pulls his hands away from the buttons.

 _No—_ he thinks— _I know where that road leads_.

What he needs is a way into Belle Reve, and what he needs to get that is _money_. Money is everything, especially in Gotham. In Gotham only two things matter: money, and fear.

And then, fear arrives on the scene like a limousine door swinging open. Chete, at the club where Chato works weekends, says the Joker is back. No one seems surprised. Well, if Chato can rise from the dead then why not the Joker too? Maybe there’s something monstrous and old in him too. Word is that Joker is looking for men. That’s all Chete knows, and he leaves Chato watching the green sunset in heavy silence, as the club begins to come to yawning life behind him.

Joker stole a helicopter from the Wall to get his girl back. Joker is the kind of man who doesn’t stop a job halfway done. The last thing on this planet Chato wants to do is work for the Joker, but Joker has the two currencies that matter in Gotham, and he can only be headed to one place.

 

 

Joker, the man himself tells Chato, is all about _aesthetics_.

“You know what aesthetics are, friend?” Joker asks him, lounging as fearlessly as a child in a nursery, his pants slung low over his sharp pale hipbones. He’s not even wearing a vest.

“Monks,” Chato says, trying not to get irritated with this unprofessional white boy. “They don’t eat. Live on top of pillars in the desert, sometimes.”

Joker blinks at him once, his face perfectly perfectly still. Then he cracks up, clapping his hands together and howling, and Chato thinks— _either he’s testing me, or he’s stupid. He knows I was born armed. I could kill him any time_.

Joker wipes away a nonexistent tear. “And a sense of humor too,” he says, to nobody in particular. “Kid, I like you.”

Chato says nothing. It’s irrelevant whether he likes Joker or not, which is good, because he does not.

Joker slithers up out of his seat. All of a sudden he is sharp and glinting in a way that almost makes you forget he’s wearing batman printed pajama bottoms under a leather coat. He prowls across the room, his porcelain white feet sliding across the plush carpet. The whole room is a glittering purple cavern, an episode of MTV cribs from some topsy-turvy hell world. A dragon’s lair.

“You know what the beeeautiful thing about fire is?” Joker says, closer now than white boys usually get. He’s staring Chato full in the face, barely blinking, and against his pallid skin his eyes are pits of green darkness.

 _Absinthe_ —Chato thinks. He looks down. He’s applying for the job, so it’s on him to look down if Joker wants to get this close.

“There’s this fairy tale I like,” Joker says. “This ratty orphan girl, wicked stepmother, you know how they go. Little Janey gets it day and night from her wicked old stepmother. She beats her and treats her mean, feeds her old bones and sawdust, I mean she _really_ lets her have it—so one day little Janey runs off to the witch’s place and says, Granny, gimme something to get that bitch outta my house. So the witch gives her a jar with an itsy _bitsy_ little hot coal in it—” Joker takes Chato’s hands and moves them as if to cup an invisible square in front of his chest, “and Janey sets fire to their house. Burns it all up with step-mommy inside. And then she says to the fire, _you can come back into the jar now_. And the fire says—” Joker leans in still closer, a hiccup of a laugh in his voice, “the fire says no! And the fire gobbles up the whole village, little Janey included.”

Chato holds very still, hyper aware of the spidery hand squeezing his shoulder.

“ _That’s_ the beautiful thing about fire,” Joker breathes, into Chato’s ear. “Once it’s lit, you can't tell it where to stop.”

There’s no way that this clown knows the first thing about Chato’s past—he’s LA, he’s barely been in Gotham two months, he hasn’t said a word about it to anyone, and as far as the law is concerned he’s dead. Joker can’t know. But the way he cackles, the way his index finger trails over Chato’s shoulder, the way his eyes glitter in his skull-dark sockets when Chato makes the mistake of looking up—it seems like he knows something deeper and more terrible than the bald facts of Chato’s life. Some truth beneath truth.

Chato can’t shake the feeling that he’s being warned—or threatened? Or just laughed at?

“So,” Joker says, patting Chato’s cheek. “You wanna join up.”

“Yes,” Chato says, carefully.

“You’re hired,” Joker says. He pulls back and smiles a bright little smile, to match his cheerful pajama bottoms. “Probationary period. I’ve got this one _job_ I’m looking to pull off. Do me proud on that, and we’ll talk about permanent placing.”

Joker spins and waltzes off, and Chato understands all at once that Joker is looking for raw expendable power. He doesn’t care who lives and who dies. He’s got no loyalty to his boys, no interest in strategizing beyond tomorrow’s score. He wants to watch the world burn, and Chato is just another convenient match.

 _Well_ —Chato thinks, as he pulls on his coat— _it’s good that I wasn’t planning on making a career with him. The moment we’re in, I’m out._

 

 

In Gotham it’s always raining. If it’s not raining then there’s a fog rolling in from the bay, and if there’s no fog, then the city starts to stink underneath the sudden blaze of sunlight. They don’t have many wooden houses in Gotham, because the foundations would dissolve into the sea. It’s getting easier to see how Gotham made men like Deadshot and women like Harley Quinn out of the common mud—there’s something nightmarish and strange about the very air in this city. He’s strange because strangeness is in his bones, in his DNA. The others have taken it into their lungs like so much cancer. He walks the piers when he has no other work to do, imagining how they must have walked it before him. Sometimes he imagines his wife kicking aside molding knots of rope, her nose squished up in disgust. He’s not sorry to leave the place. Gotham is no town for a lonely man.

It thinks strange thoughts, right up through the asphalt and into the soles of your shoes.

Joker sends him along in the main caravan. Joker himself takes a plane and meets them in Louisiana, touching down a day later in a jet that—judging by the logo and the jittering pilot—belongs to some nervous blackmailed celebrity.

In the hotel that night, Joker’s henchmen sit down and play texas hold’em in the lobby, with the doors locked from the inside. Some of them have that unmistakable meth veteran look. Some of them have scars, tattoos, missing bits. _Freaks_ —Chato thinks, not unkindly— _of which I am one_. He slips through the ranks barely noticed, occasionally approved of. A bunch of boys—a couple girls—who got torn up by life.

“How’d you get hooked up with the Joker?” Chato asks, as he folds his hand. The man across from him scrapes his makeshift chips—they're pennies—across the table.

“Same as you,” the man says, a mirthless smile twisting the ugly scar that runs out from one corner of his mouth. It gives him a lopsided, cynical look. The scar tissue there is brown and knotted. “Nobody’s hiring Glasgow accountants.”

“Boss broke me outta Blackgate,” the man to his left offers, shrugging the six inches below his right shoulder. “It’s good work, for a guy with one arm.”

“Joker’s gonna get me a farm,” says one of the meth boys. “One of those farms where they dig up the crystals, and me and my old lady are gonna smoke every day.”

“Christ, Scag,” says one of the men who’s already bowed out, “you can’t farm crystal. Ain’t no such thing as a crystal farm.”

“I killed a John,” one of the girls pipes up, with the unmistakable smugness of someone who thinks she’s winning a contest. “None of the houses wanted me after that.”

“He likes misfits,” one of the other girls announces. She says it cool and low, her berry black lips blowing it out like smoke. She’s beautiful as a statue carved out of some black gem stone, as she turns over the queen of spades with one finger. “He likes it when you’re the butt of a joke. He makes you feel like you’re in on it, and it’s funny and you don’t mind that you’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Chato turns this over through the rest of the game, through the darkness of the stuffy hotel room where he’s volunteered to take the cot on the floor. So this is Harley, then. It’s a prison of a different kind, the kind that fools you into thinking it’s a home. He thinks of Harley behind the bar, passing him a shotglass full of water, her smeared lips snarling at him. Queen of misfits. You _own_ that—she says—you _own_ that.

She deserves a real home.

 

 

The break-in is bloody and it is ugly, protracted in the swampy Louisiana heat, and Chato is perfectly happy for the Joker’s boys to avoid him like the plague as he puts out wave after wave of flameless heat. The men who work at the prison are bastards and dogs but he’s not going to kill anyone. His wedding ring is soft between his fingers, malleable and glittering, a reminder to cool his jets before he pops off again. The ring isn’t what it used to be. On the night he killed his first family, he had to scrape the half-melted pool of it off the ground. There were streaks of red and blue lights flashing off its dripping edges as he pried it up, reforging it as best as he could. Red and blue lights as he slid it back onto his finger. It’s not what it used to be, but it’s still his.

He thinks— _if it had been pure gold, it would have melted away into the gutter. If I had been a rich man when I married her, I’d have nothing now_.

Joker has eyes for nothing but Harley’s ward. It’s a simple thing to slip off once the guard is subdued, while the alarms are still screaming. He passes his old tank, and feels nothing in particular for it. It was harsh in heights of summer, but it was also safe and contained and mostly peaceful, and it had been where he wanted to be.

He finds Deadshot first. The cell looks better than Chato expected, and so does Deadshot. He’s brighter, somehow, a clearer image on a tv screen. He ducks forward, peering under the shadow of Chato’s grey hoodie until some line of ink or bone there clicks into place.

“Back from the dead?” Deadshot says, tilting his head like it’s a kind of challenge.

“Al tercer día resucitó de entre los muertos,” Chato says, tilting his head in the same way.

“Right,” Deadshot says. “Of course.”

Chato opens up his cell. Deadshot stops to grab a stack of papers—mostly letters from the look of it, but some bigger sheets too, almost like math worksheets—and joins him in the hall.

“So,” Deadshot says, pointing at the ceiling, “alarms? That you?”

“Not me, specifically,” Chato says. He’s already scanning the hall for more of his people. “I came here with a crew.”

“Your crew?”

“Nah,” Chato says. “Harley’s boy.”

“Hold up,” Deadshot says, the sound of his footsteps falling abruptly silent. “You got in with the Joker? Man, I don’t think you know what you’ve done—”

“Not for _real._ Just to get in here.”

“That’s worse,” Deadshot says, visibly horrified. “You can’t just skip out on the Joker.”

“Relax, ese, it’s _probationary_ . _”_                   

“Oh,” Deadshot says, “you think some air quotes are gonna cover your ass when the clown catches you tryna jump ship?”

Chato spots their next stop and flips through the keys. Deadshot stomps around behind him.

“Look, Diablo—”

“Chato.”

Deadshot hesitates for half a second, and then says, “Chato, okay. Look. You don’t know Joker like I know Joker. Gotham ain’t like LA.”

“I know, man. I been living there.”

Deadshot grabs his shoulders, at the same time that the lock clicks open, and jerks him around. “No, Chato, you _don’t_ know. Joker ain’t gonna forget you, man.” He looks with this uncertain, urgent concern that makes something in Chato’s chest ache. “Joker don’t know how to pick his battles. You make an enemy of the clown, you make an enemy for _life_.”

“We talking about the Joker now?” Croc says, from the entrance of his cell. He’s watching them with interest, nails slowly tattooing a rhythm on the door. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see them. There’s a dim sound coming from his cell like the baseline of a song. Thump thump, a static sound that could be a guitar.

“This reckless motherfucker,” Deadshot says, snapping in Chato’s direction, “threw in with the murder circus and _I_ bet he don’t even have an escape route.”

Chato narrows his eyes. “My escape route is the same as yours. Over the fence and down the road.”

Deadshot gestures to him with both hands like he’s presenting the centerpiece of a bad art show. Croc shrugs. “I like a simple plan,” he says.

The whole way to Boomerang’s cell, Deadshot harangues him about his half-assed scheme. Mostly Chato doesn’t mind. Deadshot is worried for him, but not worried enough to remain here in his cell for the rest of his life, and the uncertainty is distressing to him. Chato is not worried. He’s died for these people before, and he wouldn’t mind doing it again. What does he have to lose, really?

They collect Captain Boomerang, who looks frazzled and borderline manic compared to Deadshot’s cool composure—even while he’s aiming snide criticisms at Chato’s back, Deadshot is still a slick motherfucker. That’s more or less it for the shopping list. Slipknot is dead, Flag and his doctor are living it up on the bright and shiny side of the law, and Katana… well, she doesn’t need freeing from anything Chato can free her from. He hopes she got her reward, at least, whatever she was promised.

“Are we picking up the loony?” Boomerang asks, as he flings his handcuffs into the wall hard enough to bring down rubble. There’s deep red welts around his wrists, and Chato has to wonder why he’s still locked in cuffs when he’s been in his cell for a long time, by the looks of it.

Chato locks gazes with Deadshot. There’s a deep unhappy line at the edge of his mouth. Chato opens up his hands and spreads them slowly.

“No,” Deadshot says abruptly. “No, she won’t go with us. She’s crazy about that wacko. We go in there where they are and all we’re gonna get is shot.”

“That’s that then,” Boomerang says, slapping his hands together like he’s shaking off dust. “Which way out of this hell hole?”

Chato lets Deadshot take the lead as they slink through the halls of Belle Reve, the beautiful dream. _Whose dream?_ —Chato wonders, not for the first time. Croc’s cell, with its trough of brackish water; Boomerang’s stark, featureless cell, like a solitary confinement; Harley’s cage, the endless sunlight and rain and insects; his own tank, like one of Dante’s iron mausoleums—whose dream was this?

They pass a window to the atrium where Harley’s cage rests, in almost painful silence. It’s a one-way, and theoretically no one should be able to see inside to where they are, but Chato remembers Joker’s absinthe eyes and his morbid fairy tales, and he does not want to take that chance.

Chato is the last of them to pass by. He pauses for a moment, scanning the stage beyond for the flash of Harley’s white jumpsuit and pale hair. She is bright in the sunlight, milky as a corpse in the black silk arms of joker’s formal tux. _Death and his bride_ —Chato thinks, and very nearly becomes angry with it. It’s what she wants, that’s true, it is the thing she must want more than anything in the world. A resurrection. If his own wife rose from the dead, Chato knows he would—

But Joker’s love is another kind of prison, and Harley was promised freedom, not a prettier cell.

“Hey,” Deadshot says, and points his two forefingers at his own eyes. “Eyes front. We are not getting involved in that horror show.”

Chato looks between the assassin and the window. His shoulders are pressed to the cold stone of the wall, where even someone who could see through mirrors would have trouble spotting him. This is the point of no return.

“She’s one of ours,” Chato murmurs back. “If we leave her—”

“She _wants_ to go with him,” Deadshot hisses.

“If she goes with him, she’ll be back here in a month.”

“She’s a _grown ass woman_ , Chato,” Deadshot says, something like fear wrinkling the lines on his forehead. “We don’t have _time_ for this, man. Look, I’m going on, you can do what you want.”

Chato risks one more glance at the figures in the sunlight there. The pose is a wedding cake swoon, but there’s something about it he doesn’t like—some play of shadow on the faces, some angle of the arms—it looks tense. It looks like trouble.

“No,” Chato sighs, “you’re right. There’s no time.”

They detour just long enough to pick up their civilian clothes, and then they leave through the front door, guarded only by corpses and rubble. They take one of the cop cars parked out front, rummaging through the soaked clothing of the nearest body until they find the keys. The metal smells faintly of blood and piss, and Deadshot takes a moment to wipe off the residue of messy death on Boomerang’s shoulder on his way to the driver’s seat. Croc takes one look at the size of the car and signs off, saying that he’ll take his chances with the swamps. It’s a sorry thing to see him go so soon, but not unexpected. Croc lives so differently from the rest of them.  

Still, it tugs Chato in a painful way to lose one this fast.

Chato watches him go, disappearing down the road into the bayou, tunes out the argument about who’s driving and why, and silently slides into the back seat. In the southern weather his hood is heavy and stifling, but he’s not ready to pull it down just yet. Being dead agrees with him. He’s not ready to come back for good.

They’re halfway to Baton Rouge by the time the tank hits empty, and Boomerang is still trying to convince Deadshot to switch seats. They stop in front of a station that looks like it’s survived the seventies, the yellow plastic of the sign faded like sun-bleached bone. The sky beyond the station is bruising with thunder clouds, but the twisted limbs of the treetop glow like something out of a dream where the sun hits them. Despite the fact that no one has followed them, under the heavy sky it feels as if things are only winding tighter around them.

They rob the station. It’s not worth much more than pocket money, but they’re already driving a stolen police vehicle and they’ll need cash if they want to set themselves up in a new city. Chato watches from the hood of the car. He doesn’t like it, but he also knows that the others don’t have the freedom of legal death to protect them. They’ll need whatever they can get. When they leave the station with the cashier in one piece—albeit a shaking nerve-wracked one—Chato breathes a sigh of relief.

He slides into the driver’s seat and waits for the others to notice. They get into a fist fight outside the car over who gets to ride shotgun, when it becomes clear that Chato will not be moved by either Hell or high water. Chato adjusts the rear view mirror as Boomerang slides into the back seat, swiping at his bloodied nostrils. Deadshot drops down heavily into the passenger’s seat, bouncing against the leather. He’s counting dollar bills, one leaf at a time.

“That’s forty for me,” he says, tucking the bills into his shirt. “Thirty for Captain Crunch—”

“ _Thirty_?” Boomerang shouts, “I deserve at least half—”

“And fifty for Chato,” Deadshot concludes, setting the third portion down on the dashboard between them.

Chato flicks his attention over for a moment, frowning. “I didn't do nothing,” he says.

“You broke us out of that bad boy,” Deadshot says, tapping the bills with two fingers. “It ain’t much, but I don’t forget what I owe.”

It sits uneasy on Chato’s chest, the prospect of debts and collections. Here, in this company, something about it feels wrong. He says nothing.

“What’re you gonna do with your haul, Cap?” Deadshot calls over his shoulder, holding up the roll of cash, mostly ones and fives.

“ _Haul_ ,” Boomerang snarls, but snatches the roll back all the same. “Reckon I’ll catch a bus back to Central City fast as I can find one. There’s a fella up there owes me a couple kermits and he’ll pay up if he knows what’s good for him.”

“Invest in a safehouse,” Deadshot advises him, “that’s where I’m headed, soon as I can get my hands on some real clothes.”

Chato’s fingers squeeze the wheel. The skin goes pale and bloodless.

“What about you, what are you—” Deadshot pauses, his smile dropping off his lips. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Chato says. He rolls his shoulders, more of a jerk than a roll really. “I was kinda thinking—what if we stuck together a while? We were good together before. We could do it again.”

There’s a faint leather creak as Deadshot draws back.

“Nah, man,” Deadshot says. He looks worried. He looks cornered. “Nah, that’s not gonna work. That was _apocalyptic_ , that’s a whole different kinda team up.”

“Bad idea,” Boomerang adds, “a miserable buncha loners like us hanging around together. Someone’s bound to get shot.”

Deadshot turns and points at Boomerang like he’s just called the winning answer on a quiz show.

Chato tightens his fists around the wheel, watching the purpled sky up unfold ahead of them. When the storm breaks, it’s going to turn this highway into a river.

“We’d be too conspicuous together,” Deadshot goes on, running a hand over the dashboard thoughtfully. “Gotta ditch the car somewhere too, before the feds turn up asking questions. The clusterfuck at Belle Reve is only gonna hold them for a little while. Probably they’re already on our tail.”

“It’s not about _conspicuous_ , man,” Chato says, “it’s about—look, you guys work alone, I respect that. But there’s support a crew gives you. I can do things you two can’t do. You know things I don’t know. A team is always stronger, _ese_ , even a small one.”

Deadshot gives him a look that’s almost pity, and it’s all Chato can do to keep driving when he really just wants to pull over and plant a fist in his face. Chato did not come all this way to be pitied like a sobbing child.

“You’ll be fine on your own,” Deadshot says. “Better than fine. Nobody looking for you. You got money. You’ll be alright.”

“ _It’s not me I worry about_ ,” Chato snarls.

The car is quiet for a long time. The rain breaks above them, first slow and then in a downpour, flickering gold as the sun behind them catches swaths of drops on their way down, and then silver as the storm closes around them.

In the remains of a flooded fishing town, Chato pulls over and parks the cruiser behind the sagging red hull of a wood and tin house. It has its own dock, or at least it used to. All that remain are the posts pounded into the banks. “My stop,” he says, pulling the keys from the ignition. He passes them to Deadshot, who takes them with a perfectly blank face. “I’ll start walking in a day or so, once the heat dies down. It’s about five miles to the next town. I’ve made worse.”

“Pal,” Boomerang says, “you gotta be fucking with us.”

The sound of rain across the roof of the car is like a shell around them, thick and secretive and fragile enough to be shattered with one open door.

He is tired. Gotham and Belle and the wreckage of that almost-grave in Midway City—he’s burnt out. The vague images of the future he’d carefully stockpiled for them all are dissolving under the pressure of reality, like so much cotton candy. He’d thought—he had _hoped_ that they would see it his way. A fresh start. Something to build together.

He goes to open the door, but Deadshot catches his arm just as he’s about to climb out. “Come on man,” he says, “don’t leave it like that. Go to Baton Rouge with us.”

Chato is tempted. Even another couple hours of company, in the heavy silver shell of the storm, would be something. A little longer to feel like he’s part of a family, like he is somebody to someone. But Deadshot’s pity is hanging over him, ugly and sour. He would rather walk away from this as a man than trail after it like a dog.

Deadshot must see it in his face. “Where you gonna go, anyways?” he asks. He’s still holding Chato’s arm, anchoring him down before this current can carry him away.

“Portland,” Chato says, without thinking. The answer comes to him as if he’s known it all along. Portland, where it’s cold and the rain comes down in sheets, and his ghosts will not know the road to follow him. He catches Deadshot’s eye, and relents. “Look me up,” he says, slowly, “if you’re ever in town.”

Deadshot nods, and lets go. When the door opens it lets in a torrent of raindrops; they bounce off the ashtray and roll across the leather seat, and soak the knees of Chato’s pants as he swings his feet down into the mud.

He watches Deadshot circle the car and slide into the driver’s seat, bent over with his hands in his pockets like each droplet is adding another hundred pounds of pressure to his back. Chato remembers him in the prison yard, talking about his daughter. Chato remembers him in the city, his cool competence, his direction—he must have been afraid, for his own life and his daughter’s and for his team too, a man with so much still to lose, but he hadn’t splintered. He remembers the echo of a deliberately missed shot.

These are still Chato’s people, even if they don’t understand why.

Chato taps the window until Deadshot rolls it down, and then he leans over the opening, shielding it from the rain. He digs in the pocket of his hoodie, coming up with sleek glass and plastic. He was saving this, but it looks like now might be the only time.

“Take this,” he says, and tosses the phone through the cracked window, into Deadshot’s hand. “Sell the contact list to the highest bidder. Split what you get with the squad, whoever you can find.”

Deadshot is frowning as he swipes it open, scrolls through the contacts. “Cobbelpot?” he says, looking up. “ _Nygma_ ? Chato, where the _hell_ did you get this?”

Chato shrugs. “Joker is careless with his toys.”

Chato senses rather than sees the blood drain out of the hitman’s face. His pupils shrink. “You mother _fuck_ —”

The rest is lost to the rain, as Chato stands up and leaves the car for the relative shelter of the abandoned river house. It’s nice to have the last laugh for once, and experience tells him it may be the last one he has for some time. From here on, his future is uncertain. All of theirs are, but his maybe most of all. There is still something terrible lurking inside of him, and still there is blood on his hands. From the dripping porch, Chato watches the headlights of the cruiser disappearing around the bend.

Nobody ever talks about what happened to Lazarus after he walked out of the cave.


	2. How Did Your Debts Get Paid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Chato" is a nickname, so it seems reasonable that it could be carried over from identity to identity

In Portland, Chato is one freak among many. Portland, the city of runaways; homeland of misfits. The people here are poor and colorful and strange, and so far the turning of the century hasn’t scraped up any superhuman complications for their ordinary lives. Unlike LA, it is at least outwardly friendly. Unlike Gotham, it is dark without being grim, strange without being wild. Unlike LA or Gotham, when people see his tattoos they don’t assume he’s already half-way to committing a crime.

He gets a job as a waiter in a bar that has an 80’s death rock theme and receives passable tips as he learns how to swallow his pride—tries not to think that his fourteen year old self would spit on his present self’s shoes, if he saw him taking orders from a white man with a waxed mustache. It doesn’t matter. It’s peaceful. He avoids filling out paperwork with a dead man’s name on it, takes his pay home in cash, and manages not to be asked after by a mix of luck and careful strategy.

It’s peaceful. It’s nearly legit. He rents an apartment with the rest of the cash he built up in Gotham, and for the luxury of having all the fees and down payments already in hand, he manages to get something decent, with a little bit of space. There’s a kitchenette and a living room, and a room that he puts nothing in at all, for reasons that he does not particularly want to examine.

It’s a life.

It moves with the strange dreamlike quality of Enchantress’s visions—every so often he pauses with his hand on the towel rack or a stack of empty plates in his arms, and scans the corners of his eyes for the tell tale fuzziness of a false moment. Everything remains clear. He uses the ceramic chili pepper-shaped salt shakers that he found in the cupboard. He pins a button to his work apron that says “worker bee” with a little cartoon bee, because his coworker Julie handed them out at Christmas. He watches gangland documentaries, wondering if he’ll make out someone that he knows, somehow, and then gives up in disgust and exhaustion before finishing any of them.

He wakes up scraping his hands over the cotton sheets, reaching for his wife in a way that he had never allowed himself to when she was alive. He catches himself buying dinosaur marshmallows for children who don’t exist, and who would probably say they were too old for marshmallow dinosaurs now even if they did. He dreams of enchantress’s vision over and over, until the false memory of his wife’s face is the clearest one left in him.

Almost a year after his resurrection and subsequent jailbreak, Chato Santana _(Aguilar_ now) is dropping off glasses for the dishwasher when his coworker Julie says to him, “Someone out there was asking for you, Chato.”

Chato drops the last glass. It lands on the counter with a shout, and rocks back and forth for a moment before slowly coming to a rest right side up. She’s watching him intently as he picks the glass back up and inspects it for cracks.

“Didn’t look like a cop,” she says, quietly but reassuringly. “He wanted to be seated in your section, so I pointed him over. But look, if you need to make a run for it, I can cover for you.”

Chato is still holding the undamaged glass. He has exchanged maybe ten sentences with Julie in the six months since she joined the team, because she is a hard worker and he has little to say to anyone. But right now she is looking at him with such earnest concern—he thinks, all of a sudden, that she reminds him of a dog, waiting nervously for a pat on the head. He sets down the glass.

“No,” he says, “whatever it is, I’ll find out.”

Chato leaves the bright business of the kitchen and descends into the dark dining room as if moving through water. His hands brush the white lintel of the doorway. Have the tables always been so high? Have they always been scattered this way, like buckshot through a paper target? Spoons catch the orange reflection of heavy metal paraphernalia glowing on the walls. A child squirms in her chair. It’s a booth, against the wall at the far side of the room, and as he steps down into the scatter of tables, Deadshot raises his eyes from the menu. For Chato, the room falls silent.

He looks both better and worse than the last time Chato saw him. He holds himself like he’s wounded, he’s got the battered mottled look of someone coming down from an honest to god pummeling, but he is brighter and better fed and when he sees Chato the edge of his lips tick up in the barest admission of a smile.

Chato tries not to show the heaving breath of relief that escapes him, seeing physical confirmation that at least one of his friends is still alive. For months he has been burning dinner on the stove, wrapped up in grotesquely detailed thoughts of all their bodies, lying mangled out in some other city, unprotected and unmourned.

“You are not an easy guy to find,” Deadshot says, at the same time that Chato says, “I’ll be your server—”

They look at each other. Chato is too stunned to be embarrassed, but Deadshot seems to find it funny.

“I thought you could find anyone,” Chato says, at last, since Deadshot isn’t volunteering anything else.

“Well I _did_ find you,” Deadshot points out. Then he shrugs, settling back against the red vinyl. “Normally I got a whole network of guys, search engines, you name it. But the problem with those things is they ain’t exclusive. I pass it around looking for a guy with your name and description, somebody on the wrong side of the law is gonna get flagged. You feel me?”

“Why are you looking for me?” Chato asks, although he is touched that Deadshot went to such lengths to be sensitive with his information.

“Surprised you're still using the old name,” Deadshot says, scanning the menu again like he didn’t hear. “Why Aguilar?”

“I died under the US army,” Chato says, “came from the place of eagles, like. Thought it was funny.”

“You supervillains and your punny shit,” Deadshot sighs. “Next time, pick a random alias.”

“Why are you looking for me?” Chato asks again.

There is a moment of tense silence while Deadshot keeps on looking at his menu. They are probably both replaying their last conversation, their opposing views of teamwork between men like themselves. Deadshot might think he can get work for free from Chato if he only promises the right things. Chato wonders if he would let himself be used that way.

“I need to get off the grid,” Deadshot says, at last. He is sitting ramrod straight, although he is clearly trying to sound casual. “A week, max. I’ll pay you whatever the appropriate portion of your rent is. Extra for the risk you’re taking. I won’t lie to you, I am a dangerous house guest, although I’ve done a damn thorough job of losing my tail before even coming to this city.”

“Ah,” Chato says, and breaks into a genuine, rusty smile. “Is that all?”

 

 

Deadshot sleeps in the empty spare room on a couple yoga mats that Chato gets second hand from a coworker, after he mentions needing spare bedding. In the city of guests and runaways, couchsurfing is too common to raise any eyebrows. In the mornings Chato makes double his usual helping of eggs and leaves them on the stove, until Deadshot loses patience with the whole unspoken arrangement and forces Chato to sit down on the threadbare couch, which the previous occupants left behind along with their novelty salt and pepper shakers, while he digs spices out of the cabinets.

“Who taught you to cook?” Deadshot says, all but throwing the refrigerator door open. “Jesus.”

“No one, really,” Chato says. “In my family women did the cooking. And I was too busy trying to come up in the world to ever ask any of them to teach me. I learned eggs from one of the boys back home, for a hangover cure. I use less Tabasco than he did, though.”

Deadshot gives him this glare over the top of the partition that says “not an acceptable excuse”, holding the ceramic pepper shaker in his right hand. This one is shaped like a green bell pepper.

“The only way those would cure anything is by making the hangover look better in comparison.”

“I can make rice too,” Chato offers, feeling the need to defend himself a little at this point. He conveniently doesn’t mention that he had to google “how to cook rice” before he could actually do it.

“Man,” Deadshot says, “that is just, that is sad. You are sad. Before I leave this shitty apartment you’re at least gonna learn how to make chicken and rice.”

Chato squints. It’s been a long time since he even thought about that dish, and he has absolutely no idea what it looked like. He’s forgotten so much about his childhood, all of it vague and buried now. Mostly he remembers Mcdonalds. His parents were busy people. “Wouldn’t you just put some chicken in the rice?” he hazards.

Deadshot looks at him like he’s about to implode with all the commentary he’s currently holding in. His cheeks actually puff out for a minute with repressed shouting. “No,” he finally manages. “You would not.”

“How come you got so skilled up on cooking?” Chato asks. It seems like a safer question than the previous one.

“My daughter used to stay with me some of the time,” Deadshot says. “Last thing on her mamma’s mind is homecooking. Seemed like it was down to me to feed her right.”

“I bet you did good,” Chato says, and means it.

Deashot shrugs, sharply, like maybe he doesn’t want to hear that. “Did my best,” he says.

It occurs to Chato all at once that if Deadshot went to those lengths to keep Chato, a criminal and a grown man, out of the line of fire, he must take unimaginable precautions to keep his daughter safe. He probably does not see her much anymore.

“Deadshot,” Chato starts, uncertain of what exactly he’s going to say—father to father, refugee to refugee—but then Deadshot says, “Chato. C’mon. Floyd is fine.”

And then Floyd says, “Alright, get your ass in here. I’m gonna teach you how to stop burning your damn eggs.”

 

 

Boomerang is the next one to find him. It’s a few months after Floyd leaves, and the second thing the man says is, “Fuck’s sake mate, call me Digger.”

The first thing he says is, “You really just open to door for anybody? Christ, I coulda lopped your head off.”

Digger is confused by Chato’s cooking too, although in this case it’s the Tabasco sauce that’s the problem. In the matter of two days he manages to be thrown out of the restaurant where Chato works, very nearly merit a restraining order from the woman down the hall, and win so much money playing pool that he can buy a home theater system for Chato’s boxy little TV. And he does. He claims it’s for his own sake, because if he has to stare at these off white walls for one more hour he’s going to go stark raving _mad_ , but he also never bothers to buy any movies to put in it, or even finish plugging all the cords in.

After that, it’s Katana. She arrives with such certainty and expectation that it doesn’t even seem strange to see her standing there, a modest traveling bag in her hand and a wooden sheath on her back, until he’s already let her inside. She is still on her endless quest, as tense and quiet as he remembers her. She allows him to draw the conclusion that Digger shared his location, and then she thanks him for the proceeds of the stolen contacts list while pressing the envelope of cash back into his hand. She does not accept ill-gotten money, even if it was well-intentioned. Chato looks down at her traveling bag, marked with a tag that says she’s come from Metropolis, and he asks her if she would accept a few nights of hospitality instead. She accepts.

Katana says nothing about his cooking, which does not mean she has nothing at all to say. They sit in silence a lot of the time they’re together, which is probably for the best because they are technically at opposing ends of a justice system and he would not like her to feel compelled to share something he shouldn’t know. It’s a full silence, though, like a padded shipping box. She knits. It looks like a scarf, but it could just be that Chato knows nothing about what knitting should look like.

Katana leaves, but not before making it clear that he should continue to keep his head down, and not before accepting the standing invitation to return. As she walks down the stairs to the street she looks sad and beautiful and much too brave to ever be mistaken for a civilian, regardless of how many brown cardigans she wears.

Floyd passes through again, on the third day of Digger’s next stop-over. Chato suspects that he’s only visiting for the sake of visiting, but he likes Floyd too much to call him out on it in front of another man. There’s a fight for the pile of yoga mats that ends with Floyd walking down to a Walmart and buying himself a blow-up mattress. He leaves it in the closet when he eventually goes again, with a note explaining exactly what he will do with Digger’s intestines if he finds out anyone has laid so much as a finger on it.

Croc does not visit. Deadshot delivers a gift from him, though, later on. It’s a beautiful little piece, compact and efficient, probably stolen from a private safe at some point in its lifetime. Chato hesitates to take it, but he does accept. Out of all of them, Croc knows best what kind of life Chato has lived. There is always room for a gun in the pockets of men like them, even ones who are never truly unarmed. It is a thoughtful gift, with all the jaded pragmatism that Chato would expect from him.

They come and go in brief moments of noise and excitement, more regularly than anything but deliberate intent could account for. Quietly, Chato starts keeping things for them: stronger darker coffee for Digger, who complains bitterly about _American bean water_ given half the chance; skeins of yarn pulled out of the curbside bargain bin for Katana, a bewilderingly common thing in Portland; sports movies for Deadshot, who is embarrassingly American when it comes to football. Katana catches him watching _Radio_ one night and ends up emerging from a movie marathon like a confused patient from a medically induced coma, blinking at the sunrise through the venetian blinds. It’s good. It is a life.

Almost a year and a half after Chato’s resurrection and subsequent jailbreak, his apartment receives a new visitor on a dismal Sunday, gray and quiet, the sky hanging low to the earth. Chato is pulling on a jacket to run down to the farmer’s market where he will pick up whatever fruit is currently in season and eat it by the handful for the next couple of days, the way that Katana does when she visits. A knock comes at the door. Chato’s heart thumps, same as it does every time—there are so many beautiful and terrible things out there in the world, orbiting his tiny sanctuary, and waiting on the other side of that door could as easily be the mailman as it could be one of the Joker’s goons with a rocket launcher over his hulking shoulder. In Chato’s mind he can clearly see which goon it would be. It’s the one who wears the half mask with the silver studded spikes.

Chato slides along the wall, hands flat to the plaster, until he is close enough to glance through the peephole. Outside is Katana, in what looks like a stripped down version of her work clothes—the mask is gone, and the sash—and in her arms is a miserable looking mess of pale flesh. There is a thick bandage over his eyes, the gauze full and unstained. Chato throws the door open.

“Is that Flag?” he says. He does not move to help. They remain, the three of them, in stasis for a long moment, Flag lolling and breathing heavily in Katana’s arms, unresponsive to Chato’s voice. The silver plate of the threshold glitters between them, Katana’s boots and Chato’s bare feet. Flag was one of them for a moment, possibly the only moment that really matters. Flag is not like them, the misfits and the villains who hide in the shadows from dogs like him, but Flag is still one of them. Flag is—Chato remembers—a soldier, a combat veteran, and at the end of the day Chato has never really seen a difference between one gang and another. In that sense, they have come from very similar places.

“Put him on the couch,” Chato says.

He watches Katana drag Flag across the threshold and push him into the ancient cushions of the couch, a wicker oddity that looks at least three decades past its prime. Flag goes down bonelessly, moaning softly as his shoulder hits the springs.

“I am sorry,” Katana says. She pulls the edge of Flag’s jacket into place, businesslike and still echoing of something tender. “We were compromised. Betrayed. I needed to keep him somewhere safe. With someone I trust.”

“Hey,” Chato says. “Once a squad always a squad, right?”

“Perhaps so,” Katana says. She pushes up from the side of the couch and seems to shake the moment off, strings of her black hair drifting across her cheek in sweat-dried spikes. She’s been running hard, without stopping. “I will patrol,” she says, touching the hilt of the sword strapped underneath her jacket.

Chato nods. He doesn’t know what he’ll say to Flag, if the man wakes up. He doesn’t know where to start. Their bond was one of trauma and fear, a shared moment in time, and how they will find each other outside of that moment is beyond Chato’s understanding.

Katana, paused with one hand on the doorway, says, “He hasn’t forgotten you. Not at all.”

 

 

Rick Flag proves to be the least cooperative patient in the history of injured fugitives. Katana says he’s always like this, and doesn’t seem perturbed by it. Despite the fact that no one has removed his bandages, Rick still seems to think he ought to be contributing somehow. He doesn’t say much, to either of them, preferring to throw himself wholly into whatever household tasks he thinks he can accomplish without the use of his eyes, which is a lot more of them than he actually can accomplish. The man is stubborn.

Chato has a feeling that if he could see, Rick would be avoiding his eye. Rick has nothing to say about his cooking, but Chato doesn’t know if that’s because he’s improved since he moved here, or because Rick doesn’t have much to say at all. Within a day of regaining real consciousness, the captain already seems to be going stir crazy.

Chato has two hours before his shift starts. He tosses his key absently, weighing the risks he’s willing to take.

“Flag,” he calls, across the partition to where Rick is aggressively scouring a sauce pan. “Man, put that down. It’s clean. I’m going down to the market—you wanna come with?”

Rick stops mid-scrub. From the set of his shoulders it looks like he’s been asked to volunteer for waterboarding practice, as the dummy. “Nah,” he says, “thanks but—no.”

Chato watches him slowly pick up the scrubbing again. “Come on, I ain’t _that_ bad a seeing eye dog.”

“Aguilar,” Rick says, deliberately, “you know that there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, don’t you?”

“No?” Chato says, and is surprised to find that he isn’t surprised. “Where are the bandages for, then?”

Rick throws his whole shoulder into scraping some burnt lump on the pan bottom. Chato is still not a perfect cook.

“You are a fugitive from the law, Mr. Aguilar. You are presumed dead. You are living here illegally, under an assumed name, and, I’m gonna go out on a limb here, probably evading federal taxes. Right now the best thing for both of us is if I know absolutely nothing about what or who you are. No one has told me your name, I haven’t seen your face, and I have no idea what city I’m in. If you take me out there, I’m going to hear things. And if I hear things, someone might ask me to relay those things down the line, and I might not be able to say no.”

Chato watches him fumble with the drying rack, dripping suds on everything. Rick is an honorable man, in his own way. No one with too many scruples can work for Amanda Waller, but Chato is beginning to see how Rick builds a fortress around the things he cares for, a wall to keep Waller and her ilk at bay. It means something that Rick would rather stumble around this apartment in the dark than put Chato in danger.

“You like strawberries?” Chato asks.

“Blueberries,” Rick says, “if they’re in season.”

Chato pulls his jacket on, like he meant to two days ago, and heads down to the farmer’s market.

Katana disappears after a few days, leaving them alone together in the figurative and literal darkness. Rick breaks down and half-asks half-hints for a radio, and Chato obliges. When Chato comes home he asks what the news of the day is, and Rick launches in like he’s giving a detailed field report. Soon enough he goes off script, striking out for a tangent with shoulder so stiff that Chato knows he’s doing it on purpose. They are calculated rambles, premeditated digressions.

Rick tells him about the Spanish-American war, which he believes is criminally underrepresented in history books. Rick tells him about a moss that grows in England, that they used to staunch blood flow with. Rick tells him about the villages that June visited in her early career, growing soft and distant as he slides deeper and deeper into the memory, until he finally concludes at a loss, reaching out a hand for something that isn’t there.

Floyd drops by the same day that Katana returns from her mission, whatever the specifics of that might have been, and they all hover uncertainly in the living room. They are frozen: silent, fidgeting children who have all done something wrong and been caught simultaneously in the act. Katana in particular looks horrified, as if she’s betrayed a holy trust.

But Chato is overwhelmed with something else. The half-formed dreams that carried him through the dark wilderness of Gotham, buried along the highway somewhere east of Belle Reve, are climbing inevitably out of their graves, ready for the bodily resurrection. His people, together again, whole and alive.

Chato says, “Floyd, I am making chicken and rice. Come show me how to do the thing with the bones, unless you want to deal with me flying solo.”

Floyd looks over at him, deep creases gathering shadows in his face, and for a moment it looks as if he’s going to bolt. His hand twitches for the doorknob, just a handsbreadth away. But Chato fixes him with an unimpressed look, crosses his arms across his chest, and something in Floyd gives way.

“Forget that,” he says, “get out the way, I got this.”

Chato steps aside, allows Floyd to take the apron from the hook, and hands him the measuring cup. In the living room, Rick is slumped, but without his eyes it is hard to tell what from. Chato takes him by the shoulders, gently but firmly, and says, “Relax, Flag. This is my good friend Floyd Berkowitz. I’m sure he's happy to make your acquaintance.”

Rick lets out a little breath that’s got a slight hiccup to it, and then straightens up again. “I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” he says.

“Floyd,” Chato informs him, leaning in a fraction closer, “is a fan of sports movies. It’s terrible.”

The breath Rick lets out at that is definitely more in line with a laugh. He says, “And here I was about to suggest _The Breakfast Club_.”

Chato lets him go. “Never seen that one.”

“Me neither,” Floyd says, from the kitchen. He has half a chicken slit open in his hands. “Some kinda restaurant movie?”

“What?” Rick says, whirling around towards the sound of Floyd’s voice, aghast. “How have neither of you seen _Breakfast Club_? It’s a classic!”

“I haven’t seen it either,” Katana admits.

“Well—” Rick says. “You’re Japanese, you can be excused. But these two—”

Floyd and Chato exchange a look. “White movie,” Floyd concludes.

“White movie,” Chato agrees.

“It is—it is not _just_ a white movie,” Rick says. “It’s—look, is there an electronics store around here? You need to at least see it once.”

So they do. It _is_ a white movie, but Chato doesn’t mind. Rick doesn’t seem to need his eyes to know exactly what’s happening, and Katana watches this like she watches everything, rapt and entranced. Floyd packs their paper plates with mountains of chicken and rice, forcing second helpings on Rick like it’s some kind of petty revenge.

And for a night they’re together again, almost whole, almost happy.

 

 

When Lazarus walked out of that cave, shedding bandages along the stone behind him, what did he think he was walking out into? When he stepped out into the daylight, three days dead, a hand over his eyes to break the blade of the sun, did he know that his friends waited for him on the other side? Who did he go home to, and how did he repay the debt of a life returned?

Chato receives a letter in the mail, sloppily made out to a Mr. A at Chato’s address, the ink slightly water-stained but still legible. He opens it in the safety of his apartment, which he only belatedly remembers is not as safe as he lately takes for granted.

 _A_ , the letter reads, _Mr J ain’t forgot you_ . _Get out if you can._

And then there was a scribbled keycode to a warehouse that would hide a person and a few days worth of supplies in New Orleans. Croc’s safehouse, Chato presumes, and feels as if his heart would collapse to smoldering ash. Affection and fear combine like some terrible chemical slime inside him, too thick and toxic to move through. _The phone_ —he thinks. Floyd was right all along, there was no harmless skimming off the top when it came to the clown prince of crime. When he had taken it he had been unafraid, with his new lease on life and his mission, determined to take every opportunity to make a better life for his people regardless of the risk.

Chato stares at the letter without seeing it. New life, same mistakes. Arrogance, stubborn recklessness—he can almost hear his wife shouting at him, a ghost that has finally found its way over his threshold. He has lit its way here with the lantern of his stupidity. He left the door open for it.

He has so much to lose now. On the corner of the DVD player there is still the open case for _The breakfast Club_ , the disc inside pink and shining. He drifts over to it and carefully clicks the case closed. He has a life here, maybe for the first time. He loved his wife and his children, Christ he loves them still, but that was never a whole life, and that was his fault entirely.

What he’s building here is Floyd’s mattress in the closet and rent money and Julie from work and peace, elusive bitter sweet peace, a chance to ride out the nightmares in the hope that one day he will deplete his stock of them. He is sick of fighting these petty fights, of the escalation and the fear. He is sick of trying to outrun his own mistakes. He could pick up and leave, right now, and head down to Croc’s safehouse, and the only thing that would happen is that Joker would stretch his searching hand out through the gutters of the country, and if Chato was lucky it might take him another year or two to be found.

A life on the run means more sleazy street jobs, more violence, more fear. It means no more domestic movie nights, no more collecting the odds and ends of a life, no more visitors, no more safe places.

Chato had been more than willing to die for his people, but now that it comes down to it, he finds that he is also willing to die for himself.

 

 

Three days later, Chato is laying the check down on the table of what looks like a really bad blind date, when he hears it. Under the fuzzy din of hair metal on the speakers, under the click of ceramic and the sound of human voices, there’s a faint ticking. Chato frowns as he pulls away from the table, pen tapping against his thigh. What is that, a pocket watch? His eyes scan the nearby tables, searching out a source.

“Is there something else?” the woman at the table asks, nervously, as if she’s afraid for this date to take any longer than expected.

Chato shakes his head, starts to tell her not to worry about it, and finds that he can’t quite commit to the words. It’s been decades and decades since bombs ticked, but he grew up watching cartoons just like every other inner city kid, and it’s the exact same noise. It sounds like someone sliced the sound effect free from the cartoon. There’s something uncanny about it.

“Do you hear that?” he says.

The woman looks up, and then down, and she says, “Actually yeah. I thought maybe it was a clock?”

“No,” Chato says, narrowing his eyes.

The man at the table glances between the two of them, and then presses his ear to the table cloth, missing a puddle of melted ice by bare centimeters. “Huh,” he says, biting the corner of his lip.

It’s very strange—Chato’s ankle is itching and the windows are flashing with the reflection of headlights passing outside, and the world is perfectly, mundanely real, but there’s just this one thing out of place. He knows that he’s going to look ridiculous for it, but he just can’t not check. He grabs the tablecloth and flips it up, and bends over to peer underneath it.

For a moment Chato just stares at it. There is a bomb strapped to the underside of the table. The sticks of dynamite are red and papery, and ductaped to the little ticking counter. Part of him just can’t reconcile the familiar carpet and the murmur of the patrons and Twisted Sister muffled over the speakers with this, the looney tunes absurdity of it. And then the rest of his brain takes over.

“Get up,” he says, sharply. He points to the front door and says, “Go. Dinner is on us.”

While they’re stumbling up from their seats, shaking the silverware on the table in their haste, Chato turns and catches Julie by the arm.

“There’s a bomb,” he says.

“There’s a _what?_ ” she says, much too loudly.

Chato jerks a hand towards the folded-up tablecloth. Julie, who is a head shorter than him, bends a little bit and comes up white as the sheet.

“I’ll get the guys at the front,” she says, “you get the kitchen staff.”

Chato stumbles over the step up to the kitchen. The restaurant is nothing like steaming wet LA sidewalk, but he is thinking of a driveby he survived a long time ago--the sudden bang and _thump_ of Francisco hitting the pavement, and how loud the sounds of the city had seemed at that moment. Everything exactly as it had been the moment before, except death, like a splash of fresh graffiti on a wall you’ve passed a thousand times, smelling of pennies and stomach acid.

He gets into the kitchen, and he slams the flat of his hand against the glass case that holds the extinguisher, loud enough that everyone pauses to look at him. “We need to evacuate,” he says. “Right now. Drop what you’re doing.”

In the stunned silence that comes next, he can hear the panic in the front room swelling to a crescendo—customers are much easier to spook than employees. Chato finds that he is breathing hard. He looks from one pair of confused eyes to another, and barely manages not to flare up at them. “ _Well_?” he snaps, and that at last is enough to do it. The staff start setting down their plates and knives, casting uncertain looks back at him as they go. If the manager wasn’t outside taking a smoke break, this would be easier—Chato has never been very good at getting people to do what he wants. Maybe he should have set a small fire and let that do the work for him.

A small hand closes around his shoulder, and Chato whirls to find Julie there, her mouth in a grim line. “That’s the last of them,” she says. “I hope this isn’t some kind of a hoax, I don’t even want to _think_ about the lawsuits-”

 _Lawsuits_ rings fuzzy in Chato’s ears, like a word from an unfamiliar language.

“Out,” he says.

Julie hesitates, and then she says, “Aren’t you coming?”

“Un momentito,” Chato says, and pushes her towards the door. There’s something deep in his gut telling him that he’s missing something, and the only way to find out for sure is to dive back in.

The music is still playing over the speakers, and now he can make out the smug opening thrum of _Enter the Sandman_ coming through the silence like a strange haunting. Memorabilia blinks on in the window. The faint sound of a confused and milling crowd slips through the cracks in the door. Chato lifts the table cloth again and gently peels the ludicrous package free from the tape. Four sticks of old fashioned dynamite. Chato flips it over in his hands, to get a better look at the timer, and his hands come away sticky with yellow paint.

There’s a fresh yellow smiley face painted here, lopsided and toothy, and Chato has enough time to think “Oh,” before the timer clicks done.

There’s a fraction of a moment of perfect silence. The street and the speakers all seem to go mute with the perfect singularity of a collapsing star. And then light. The package bursts into hungry white blossoms, a carnivorous flower, in the air as Chato slings it towards the back wall—the shadows of the room are erased in heat and light, shrapnel from the mangled timer, the vinyl of the seat cushions sizzles and falls away in liquid rivers-

And Chato is fire, fire that fire knows and welcomes and passes over harmlessly, and for that perfect second as the blossom unfolds in artificial Discovery Channel time, Chato is again the ancient and terrible thing that stood beneath Midway City.

But then it’s over, just as quickly, and Chato is only a man clutching at the melted plastic shrapnel that is trying to burn its way into his right arm.

He escapes through the kitchen. He stumbles out into the employee parking lot and into the murmuring mass of his coworkers. His manager still has the burning end of a cigarette in his right hand, entirely forgotten as he stares. Julie is organizing people, pointing at the dish washer who has a cell phone to his ear. Chato stands there at a loss, looking over these people whose lives were very nearly on his conscience. He knows what that yellow smiley face means. It means culpability.

Julie catches his eye and comes over, takes him by the shoulder and pulls him around. “The police will be here soon,” she says.

Chato nods. The police will be here, and the police will want to interview the person who found the bomb, and the person who is standing closest to the crime is always the first—and often the last—suspect, especially if he's brown and covered in tattoos. He may have to run. Maybe he should have already started.

“You’re--” Julie starts, and then she sighs. “Chato, I want to make this very clear. I found the bomb.” She stares him down with her watery blue eyes, waiting for some kind of protest. “I found it,” she goes on, “and then I sent you into the kitchen to warn the others. And then Mr. Barbas sent you home, because you were the last one out of the building and it shook you up too badly to talk. I’ll make arrangements for you to interview with the others.”

In the southeast somewhere, they are hanging innocent men from the trees—in South America somewhere, the people who belong to that soil are starving—on the docks of Gotham even now someone’s life is being squeezed out of him one night at a time—and Chato has lived for so long in the world where all these things happen simultaneously that he has forgotten how somewhere, also, a girl barely out of high school is trying to save the life of a man she has barely spoken a handful to sentences to.

“No,” he says, after a moment, “it’ll look stranger if I go. I’ll stay for questioning.”

He’s been so fixated on the family forced together in chaos and fear, a family of chance, that he has forgotten that friendships are ultimately the products of choice. He has forgotten that people choose to be good to each other.

Chato stays for the police interviews, which are haphazard, and says nothing about the cheerful yellow paint, because that is something he should not be able to know.

 

 

Chato returns home hours and hours later in a whirl of exhaustion and echoing siren lights. He checks his rooms for anything suspect and then crashes. In his heart he knows that the bomb at the restaurant was never meant to kill him. The Joker does nothing simply—in the hour of real time that Chato knew him, Chato got the distinct impression that Joker could no more skip the flash and smoke than a cat could kill a lizard in one blow. He was the type that played with his food.

Chato falls asleep to the memory of Joker’s sly, artificial voice saying “aesthetics, friend”.

Chato doesn’t go back to work. The place is a wreck on the inside, and the manager tells them the insurance agency doesn’t expect it to be fixed for another month. Chato is grateful. He’s not putting those people in any more danger.

He spends his daylight hours instead in the apartment building, mostly in silence, waiting. If they want him, they’ll have to come here. He goes up onto the roof at night and strings the concrete with wires, sets lines from here to the neighboring buildings. The roof is off limits to everyone in the complex, which means the only ones who know about the wires are the birds that roost there. He works in silence. The birds seem to approve.

On the third day, like the fulfillment of a prophecy, there’s a knock at the door. Chato opens it to find Floyd Lawton with his arms crossed. Behind him there is Digger, looking like a rat caught out in the daylight.

“Not one call,” Floyd says. He pulls his old fashioned flip phone out of his pocket and dangles it between them, like a disappointed parent. “No text, no email. Man, what the hell you been doing?”

Chato frowns. “Ain’t never called you before, Floyd.”

“Yeah?” Floyd says, and pushes past him, “and you never been blown up before either.”

Ah—Chato thinks—news travels fast with these people.

The two of them bustle in like it’s their own house—Digger swipes the Makers Mark off the top of the fridge and takes an absent swig as he sets his things down. His things, in this case, look a lot like weaponry. Floyd is wearing red tinted lenses that seem to flicker as he turns his head—Chato doubts that they’re a fashion accessory. He watches the two of them putting their things away, smooth and practiced from countless previous visits, and feels a jerk against his rib cage as if someone is trying to inflate a balloon at the center of his heart.

“You guys don’t need to be here,” he says. “I made my own trouble.”

“Sure you did,” Floyd agrees, “and we profited off it. I’m a businessman, see. I’m just making a return investment.”

Chato jerks a thumb at Digger, who is trying to balance the stack of yoga mats with the bottle of whiskey still in his hand.

“Don’t look at me, mate,” Digger says, “I lost a lotta money in Star City, haven’t got a zack to my name. Your place is the only one where I ain’t gotta pay rent.”

Chato suspects that is both true and untrue, but he’s not ungrateful enough to pick it apart. Truth be told, he was ready to face this alone, he was stone down to it, but seeing them here… If they want to stand with him, he won’t send them away.

“Let me show you the roof,” he says.

 

 

At midnight, Chato opens the door to a hulking shadow on his doorstep, hooded as if to keep off the rain that stopped four hours before.

Croc says, “Something wrong with Louisiana, fam?”

Everyone on the squad seems to agree that Croc isn’t the type to leave his hideaways without reason—Rick mentioned off hand once that Croc spent an entire year in the storm drains of Gotham without apparently surfacing even once. And Chato can see why. A man of his size and looks is hard enough to hide, let alone transport. Getting here on such short notice must have taken nearly a miracle.

Chato just lays the flats of his palms on either side of the monster’s shoulders. “It’s good to see you, ese,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”

Croc shrugs him off but looks vaguely pleased anyhow. You can see it in the tilt of his glittering eyelids.

Chato watches him roll through the tiny apartment like a tidal wave, and asks the room in general, “Who did you hear it from?”

They all share a look, and then Floyd and Croc turn their attention as one to Digger, who shifts uneasily on his feet.

“Mighta got a ring,” Digger says, “anonymous tip. Concerned citizen, like.”

“The government gets anonymous tips,” Chato points out. “Wanted criminals? Not so much.”

“Weeell,” Digger says, “the government passed it on, you might say.”

Chato thinks— _Katana and Rick_. His balloon heart throbs painfully in his chest, and he resists the urge to reach up and hold his ribs in place by force. This is the dream that carried him out of the rubble in Midway, all of them united again to a single purpose, alignments and loyalties and grudges laid aside for one more golden minute.

“C’mon,” Floyd says, throwing his knees over the sides of a kitchen chair. “War council, boys. The clown’s coming sooner or later, and we had better have something for him when he touches down.”

Croc takes up most of the couch, leaving enough room for one person at the far end. Digger takes one look at that and drops his ass down on the coffee table instead. Chato takes the empty spot instead.

“Why don’t we just kill him,” Digger says, searching for his own reflection in a swirl of amber liquid. “Deadshot’s supposed to be able to dust anything.”

The look Floyd shoots him says that this might be a sore spot of a kind. “Doesn’t take with the Joker,” he grinds out. “You wouldn’t be the first to ask. I don’t know how he knows, he just—always knows.”

“Huh,” Digger says, “I think you need a little caveat on your slogan then, mate. Can Kill Almost Anyone Except the Bastard What Needs Killing Most.”

Floyd points a finger sharply at Digger. “You ask anyone,” he says, “no respectable hitman in America will accept a flag on the Joker.”

“Joker can’t be killed,” Croc rumbles, watching them all through one glittering eye.

Chato looks at him. Croc is a long time Gothamite, master of the ancient sewers there, and pragmatic in his own way. “Do you mean he’s a meta human?” Chato says, carefully.

“Nah. Nah. Don’t think so anyway.” Croc’s skin makes a strange papery sound as he drags his hand over the curve of his jaw. “You just can’t kill him. Flesh and blood born far as I ever heard. You know how water never runs back up the river from the ocean? Don’t know why. He’s human except he don’t die, feel me?”

“So if we can’t kill him,” Chato says, and finds that even though Joker is a diseased rat of a human being he is still somewhat relieved to have that option taken off the table, “maybe we fuck him up good enough to get him off our case?”

“Won’t work,” Floyd says. “You take off an arm and it’ll just make him meaner.”

Digger snorts, a dark expression on his face. “What _does_ the mongrel respond to, then?”

“The Bat,” Croc says simply. He closes the other eye.

Chato and Digger share a look. Floyd goes granite hard. “No,” he says, “no goddamn way. That motherfucker took my daughter from me.”

“It’s a titch too close to coppers for my liking,” Digger admitted. “And suppose the Bat decides to go for full bingo? I’m not getting lagged again.”

Chato thinks of the Joker’s batman printed pajama bottoms, and he knows in his bones that this is the only way to deal with a thing like him. You don’t bring a gun to an exorcism. You don’t bring a restraining order to a wild fire. Chato has looked up “aesthetics” in the time since that fateful meeting. He has an inkling of an idea how the Joker’s mind works.

“He’ll have his hands full with just the Joker,” Chato says, slowly, “if I can keep you all away from the finale, he won’t even bother.”

“We ain’t leaving you alone,” Floyd says, “especially not with the Bat.”

“I’m clean,” Chato points out, “cleaner than any of you, anyhow.”

“Man, I didn’t come all the way out here to see you dragged off to Arkham.”

Chato shakes his head. “I’ll be fine. This might be the only plan that works.”

Croc shifts on the ancient cushions, suddenly becoming a separate entity from the furniture again. “It’s your life,” he says, with a shrug like a sliding glacier. “Your call.”

So he calls it.

 

 

Dusk comes like a film over the sky in Portland, darkening the clouds and smoothing out the edges of the shadows below until nothing but twilight remains. Chato is standing in his bathroom, tracing the lines of the eye sockets tattooed into his skin. He got them so long ago, because in those days every boy from his neighborhood was a dead man walking—he had gone to meet the grave with both his middle fingers up, trailing fire behind him. His wife had loved them, the artistry, how they followed the lines of the bones underneath. Now they feel like the receipt of an expensive transaction, and Chato runs a thumb over the 13 on his neck with a flash of superstitious unease. Walking dead man. Back from the grave.

When the first alarm comes, Chato drops his hands and leaves the mirror behind.

The first alarm is only the buzzing of the beeper Floyd gave him. Someone is in the crosshairs of the sniper rifle outside, and they’re not a resident. The second alarm is Digger throwing the door open, swearing a red streak, and shooting two fingers towards the window. Chato waits there. Digger ducks out into the hallway and disappears in the direction of the stairwell.

Chato’s fingers seem to almost vibrate with anticipation, like the snow on old television sets. Static jumps from digit to digit. The trick here is to get everyone out of his apartment without destroying the place—if the police have to talk to Chato twice in the same month, there will almost certainly be questions raised that he cannot afford to answer. He hears the footsteps on the landing. He curls his buzzing fingers over the window sill. There is a thump against the door. A heavy crunch.

As the door falls in, Chato has the fractal impression of glittering studs and black plastic where a jaw should be, and then he is away—in a world of brick and cold wind off the Willamette, the darkened clouds, and the wire under his hands. There is crashing and shouting from his rooms below, but he keeps climbing. He is three floors from the roof. His body hangs heavily from his straining shoulders, and he thinks— _I should have kept working out_.

Hand over hand on the thick cord of the wire, the cornice comes almost into reach, and then the line snaps taut underneath him. Some _gilipollas_ has decided to climb up after him. Chato risks a glance back down and notes, unsurprised, that it’s a huge one struggling up after him. He seems slow, ought to be with all that weight hanging off him, but the problem is the cord…

Chato scrambles up onto the ledge as the cord begins to make grinding noises against its mooring. For a moment he’s frozen, watching it twang and jump over the edge of the brick. He could easily kick it free. It’s already on its way out. It would hardly even be his fault, if this idiot was stupid enough to climb an unfamiliar wire and got dropped for his trouble. Chato wouldn’t even have to use his powers.

He takes one step back from the wire, and then another, and then he turns and he runs. He’s done delivering death. It’s too deep of a wake to leave behind himself.

The rest of the goons come crashing through the roof access door about the same time the idiot rolls over the ledge, grasping his mask and ripping it off like he’s one breath away from suffocation. Even alive, it looks like that one is out of the running. Chato skids around the length of pipe and pounds across the concrete, teeth splitting over a nasty grin as the wires between the pipes twang and pop.

A dozen bodies go down heavily over the trip wire, and the rest of them are backed up like confused animals behind their fallen comrades. Chatos’ bogo sneakers scrape concrete and then he leaps, catching the wire over to the next roof. His hands are raw and sore but it’s a long way down so he pulls himself along, anyways, swinging bogo sneakers and all. There is a light on in one of the windows below him, some lone midnight writer. Strange to think a pane of glass is all that stands between Chato’s evening and theirs.

Chato hauls himself up on the next roof over and doesn’t stop running. The next couple of buildings are close enough together to jump, but after that it’s an intersection and not even their crew can tightrope across a public thoroughfare without someone noticing. The sky is going black at the center, like a rotten fruit, and the wind is cold up here, above the breakage of the neighborhood. Chato huffs heat, sparks rolling along his tongue as he runs. He hasn’t had much cause for running this last year. He’s not as strong as he used to be.

Part of him thinks— _those goons were awfully stupid for a boss’s crack enforcement team._

Maybe Joker wanted him to run. Maybe Joker was hoping for a chase. Cats always seem to be right where the lizard is going, and it’s hardly even remarkable when you remember how much bigger a cat is, how much more of the world it can see. But if that’s the case—

There. At the end of the block, a hummer glowing acid green in the traffic lights. That was the Joker’s problem—he had rules too, although he probably didn’t think of them in that way.

Chato stops, panting, at the edge of the last rooftop. Below that there’s only tree limbs and then asphalt, and the hummer of course, throbbing like a sore thumb among the worn but serviceable cars of the neighborhood.

There’s a click, and then the sound of two gloves coming together softly. Chato whirls. From the shadows of the roof access, Joker steps forward. He’s covered in sequins, like a burlesque show, catching every dying flicker of light in the sky. He catches Chato’s eye and winks, gives a tap-dancer’s twirl and spreads his arms.

“Like it?” he hisses. “It was this or the Armani, but I hate to scuff a good designer.”

Behind him, there’s movement to the shadows, a second body lurking in the darkness. Joker follows the line of Chato’s sight and makes a little _ah_ sound.

“Come on up, dollface,” he says, and reaches back into the dark. Harley Quinn stumbles forward into the light, glittery and stunning and looking about as terrified as Chato has ever seen her. “I believe you two already know each other,” Joker says, dragging her around in front of him.

“Puddin,” Harley says, in a desperately fake cheerful voice, “couldn’t I just wait in the car?”

Joker _tsks_ , waving a gloved finger right in front of her nose. “Oh no,” he says, “after we came all this way? No no no.” Joker turns back to Chato, leaning forward as if to deliver a secret aside, and says, “Next thing you know she’ll leave me alone at couples tango class.”

Chato ignores him. “Harley,” he says, “are you alright?”

“Oh, just fine,” Harley says, wiping a smudge of mascara from under her eye. “You know me, I get by.”

It makes Chato almost ill, the two of them in their matching costumes while Harley cringes and desperately tries to dissolve into a puddle on the concrete. It's a happy thing made cruel.

“Oh sweetheart,” Joker says, as he pulls his gun from his pocket, “you do so much more than get _by_. Now, Chato here, he _gets by._ How’s it been, scraping by like a mouse under some housewife’s kitchen? Do you miss the streets, El Diablo? Do you miss living?”

“I am living,” Chato says. “A real life. Not a half life like yours.”

Joker lets out a bark of a laugh, clapping his hands together—the pistol between them glitters like his burlesque hall suit. “He is a _spitfire_ , isn’t he?” Joker says. He doesn’t seem to be addressing anyone present. “That’s why we like you,” he adds.

Chato looks pointedly at the pistol. “Is that what this is?”

“Well,” Joker says, laying the tips of his fingers against his chest, “ _I_ certainly like you. See, you coulda jumped any time in the last couple minutes, which is what most guys would do. But you’re still here, _aren’t_ you? Because mouse or not, you’re no coward, Chato Santana. And you can’t stand the idea of dying like a lamed animal on the street down there, crawling away into some gutter to wait for one of my boys to find you.”

Chato glances back down, off the edge of the roof. He thinks you could catch a limb on your way down, but Joker’s right, there’s a good chance you'd break some important bones before you could get any further. Chato thinks again of the cat and the lizard.

“So you can’t go down,” Joker says, “you can’t go up, and you can’t go back. What’s left?”

Chato says nothing. The last dull yellow rings are fading from the rim of the sky, and from here he can see the roof of the illogically tall Walgreens a block away.

“Mr. J,” Harley tries again, her heels skating backwards towards the exit. “You really don’t need me—”

“Au contraire,” Joker snaps. He catches her wrist in a vice grip before she can take another ginger step. “You’re the reason why we’re here, my dear.” He drags her in front of himself, like a child dragging a toy across the floor. “See,” he says to Chato, “I don’t care about electronics. I don’t care about contacts. You can _have_ them, Chato, and I mean it. Why, just yesterday I threw a 1000 dollar piece of Wayne Tech into a dog pit. I’m not _petty_ , Chato.”

Joker takes Harley’s right hand and pushes the pistol into it, hanging off her shoulders like a shooting instructor. Her hands tremble.

“What I do care about,” Joker continues, as he gently steadies the trembling in Harley’s hand, “is my dear sweet Harlequin. I suppose if I had a vice, it might be jealousy. Chato, you’re a married man, you know what it’s like. I don’t think it’s so wrong to want to be the center of another person’s world, do you?”

Chato says, “Being at the center is different than being the only person in it.”

Joker shrugs. “To-mato to-mahto,” he says, and lets go of Harley. She holds the position like a figure frozen on a tv screen. “I don’t like competition. And you and your friends,” he says, “are competition. You know what the first thing she said to me when I came to break her out was? She wanted me to bust you guys too. Naturally I said no, I mean, with a lousy welcome like that? No way.”

Joker makes his way across the concrete to Chato, his sidewinder walk crunching the sand of the pavement. There is still the beautiful compact gun that Croc sent over in Chato’s pocket, and for a moment he struggles not to go for it. Joker is only taking his time because he thinks he has Chato in a corner. The first hint of a fair fight will spook him.

“I mighta let it go,” Joker carries on, “except the first thing she does when we hear about the phone is _beg_ for your life. You must be something real special, Diablo. You must be, to make my girl worry about _you_ when we’re supposed to be honey-mooning.”

And now he is standing just in front of Chato, his hissing voice almost lost in the wind. There are those eyes again, absinth and acid, glittering in the falling dark. Would it be so bad, Chato thinks, to put one shot in his heart? Even if he dies, after all, wouldn’t it be worth it?

“You probably think you’re different from me,” Joker murmurs. “Cause you got a _life_ and I don’t. But you’re a murderer just like me, a murderer chumming it up with misfits and losers. Your happy little life is built on violence, Chato my dear, on death. On the graves of your first family.” He reaches out and smooths a rumple in Chato’s t-shirt. “And now your hospitality is gonna bring your home down, brick by brick.”

Joker steps full aside and turns back to Harley. Her sequins match the wet shine on her cheeks.

“Take him out, baby,” Joker calls.

Chato meets Harley’s eyes. He knows an addict when he sees one, and right now Harley is standing in that dark place at rock bottom where the glass crunches under your feet. He wants to say, _I died for you_ , but he knows he would do it again even now; even if she does shoot him, he’d still do it all over again. He's not going to pretend it’s some kind of leverage.

And then the miracle happens.

It’s not batman dropping out of the sky—Chato doesn’t know where he is or if he’s even coming, their message to the GCPD was the worst kind of hail-mary pass—instead, it’s Harley turning the gun on Joker, her heels scraping the ground as she twists to face him.

“No,” she says, and she is crying but her voice is hard. “No, J, I love you, but I ain’t doing this.”

“Harls, baby,” Joker sooths, saccharine and poisonous. “Think about who you’re crossing, now.”

“Chato’s a nice guy,” Harley says, “he don’t deserve this.”

“Since when do you care who _deserves_ this?”

Harley swipes more inky tears from her cheek. She is most beautiful like this, red-faced and smudged and holding her ground. “I know I’m a rat and a monster,” she says, “but Chato is my friend, and I’ll die before I do him like that.”

Joker looks at her, looks at Chato, and then says, “Alright.”

Sequins flash, the buckles of Harley’s heels glitter as her feet move, Chato feels the smooth handle of the gun in his hand before he even knows that he’s reached for it—if the clown lays even one finger on her—

Harley’s gun blows, the crack of the bullet splitting the air, but even now she can’t seem to bring herself to hurt the man she loves. Concrete explodes like dust at his feet and he recoils, the simple blade of his knife wicked and Paleolithic in his hand.

Chato fires truer, but the snake is already gone, uncoiled and springing forward. He catches Harley by the throat, his other hand twisting the pistol from her grip. It clatters to the ground, out of reach.

“Harley Harley Harley, sweet gal of mine,” he says, “you wouldn’t hurt me _really,_ would you?”

“No-o,” she says, with a hiccup.

“Of course not,” he hisses, “because I made you.”

Harley looks past him to Chato, who can’t get a clear shot like this, and he knows that she’s thinking what he’s thinking right now—once Joker remembers that gun on the ground, somebody is going to die. Either Chato will shoot him, or he'll shoot one of them. Maybe both.

“No offense, Mr. J,” she says, “and I mean it, but —I made myself.”

She jams a knee in a place where knees are really not supposed to go and she ducks, snagging the gun off the concrete as Joker lets out a noise that is more primordial jungle than human voice box. It sounds more like rage than pain—Chato wonders if she pulled her punch there too.

Harley is like a streak of light coming across the ground, the pistol dark against her pale hand, her eyes terror wide, and in the sky beyond her Chato sees the heavy shape of a chopper against the sky—the moment seems to last forever, golden light reflecting from Harley’s necklaces, the blinking lights of the helicopter, the dark spot growing larger and larger as it hurtles towards their rooftop—and then time falls forwards on itself. Harley catches his hand as she races past and they go over, off the top of the building, into the empty space above the intersection.

Chato catches hold of his last wire, strung between the tree and the third story window, and his shoulder shrieks against the combined weight of himself and Harley. They bounce once, the wire snapping taut, and the flesh of Chato’s palm splits bloody under the pressure. He lets go. They hit the ground in a graceless roll, a hard landing that rattles his teeth and forces a guttural scream out of Harley, wet and terrible and breathless. Her ankle, or maybe her wrist?

He grabs her by the ribs and pulls them both to their feet, tries not to fixate on the rasping sobs that are coming out of her mouth. He landed partly on top of her, and that couldn’t have done her any good. They need to get out of here, _immediately_. That blooming spot of darkness against the sky could only have been one thing, and neither of them can afford to get caught up in something of that magnitude. You might as well look for mercy in a tornado.

They stumble across the road and keep going, towards a parking garage that Chato knows. He leans Harley up against a sedan at the back, and pulls out his cell to check if everyone is off the map by now. Deadshot is clear. Boomerang is clear. Croc is clear. There’s no one left but Chato, and Harley, behind the sedan in the 24 hour parking garage.

It’s her wrist _and_ her knee. He’s seen something similar in LA, and he’s got an inkling of what to do with the knee cap but he’s _terrified_ of getting it wrong. He procrastinates on the problem by burning strips of cloth from his t-shirt to wrap her wrist, carefully trying to keep everything lined up straight. Keeping such fine control of his powers makes his fingers shake, but it’s not like he can just rip a cotton Walmart tee into bandages with his bare hands.

“Thank you,” he says, when the pain seems to have quieted down in her. “I know that wasn't any kinda easy for you.”

Harley huffs something that wants to be a laugh but falls short. “No sweat,” she says. “I jump off buildings all the time.”

That’s not what he meant, and he knows that she knows, so all he says is, “Still. You saved my life.”

He knots off the last of the wrappings. There’s not much for sprains but ice and time, neither of which are in heavy supply right now. There is always the Walgreens, he supposes, if he could leave Harley here for a while safely.

“My life's been bought for me twice now,” Chato says. “I can’t help thinking I owe debt. Hard to say what that is though. Or who I pay it to.”

“God?” Harley suggests, with that Quinzell glitter in her eye that means she’s testing him out.

Chato shrugs. “Could be,” he says. He conjures a thin flame in the palm of his hand and watches it claw at the air, struggling to grow bigger against his control. They always want to grow, and he has never been very good at stopping them. He closes his palm. “He’s never taken much interest in me before, though.”

Harley closes her eyes. “Maybe it’s just you,” she says. “Maybe you owe yourself the debt, whatever it is.”

She seems like she needs breathing space, so Chato pulls his fucked up t-shirt back on and walks down to the mouth of the parking garage, and wishes for a cigarette. It's been a long night. Peace is settling back in now, and with it there's days of accumulated exhaustion and stale adrenaline. Chato aches.

After a while, one shadow detaches itself from the surrounding shadows, under the eaves of the building across the road. It moves like silk through the air, and Chato watches it approach with a flicker of interest. He can see why folks in Gotham get so nervous in the dark. The thing really doesn’t move like a person.

“Chato Santana,” the Bat says, as if he’s checking the name off a list. It’s no surprised to Chato that the bat knows him, although they haven’t met. At least not that Chato knows of, not with the mask on.

“Never heard of him,” Chato replies.

The Bat makes a rumbling, unimpressed noise. This close, Chato can see the paleness of his skin. White guy, probably. Dark follicles under the skin. He gets the feeling the Bat doesn’t usually come out early enough for details like that to be visible, and if he did, he certainly wouldn’t get close enough for someone to make them out. Chato wonders if this means something.

“I’m not going with you,” Chato says, just so they’re clear. “I have a life here. Family. I’ve done nothing but live.”

The Bat makes that noise again. “I could have you in on aiding and abetting,” he says. “Evasion of justice.”

“Yeah,” Chato says, “but then you’d be a cop, and we all know you never been a cop.”

The Bat says nothing. Chato nods.

“You deal with the real evil, like him.” Chato tips his chin in the direction of the fateful rooftop. “You don’t nab the bastards’ grannies and girlfriends. I seen there's a rhythm to these things. I lived in Gotham for a bit.”

“I know,” the Bat says.

“Keep him away from her, if you can,” Chato says. “She loves the _cabrόn_ , somehow. She won’t last long if he’s out walking under the sun.”

“Worry for yourself. You’ve made a powerful enemy tonight.”

“When I have the time, I will.”

The Bat shifts, just the smallest change of stance, and Chato instinctively knows that he is about to rejoin the shadows again.

“Hey,” Chato calls, “will you do me a favor, since I’ve done one for you already now?”

“I didn’t ask you to help me.”

“I know.” Chato comes up off the wall and moves in, his hands palm up and open in the universal sign of peace. “So I'ma ask it real quiet, into your ear, and you can decide whether it's something I deserve.”

The Bat catches him an arm’s length away, one hand flat to his chest. It is gentler than Chato expected. “Ask,” he says.

So Chato does. And after a moment of—possibly perplexed—silence, Batman tells him very clearly and specifically how to return a dislocated knee cap to its appropriate location.

 

 

Harley comes home with him, takes over the stowed mattress on the daybed in Chato’s room, and spends a week convalescing. For seven days it is a riot of sound and color and chaos in Chato’s apartment—even bedridden, Harley brings a vividness to that small space unlike anything Chato has experienced. She laughs, she shouts, she badgers the boys for ice and juice and comic books, demands to know everything that has happened in the last year, cries when Floyd talks about his daughter, who he hasn’t spoken to since the prison break. She has ugly episodes when she wakes, vicious clawing moments of fury and confusion, but Chato knows what those are. He’s had them too. Each time, they pass.

They watch movies. Harley loves cinematic mind-screws and forces them to sit through two hours of prostitutes murdering men set to rock music. Chato brings home dinner from various take-out places. None of them has ever tried Malaysian food before. There’s no space for anyone or anything inside the apartment, and twice Digger tries to cut Floyd’s fingers off.

They cook in the evenings. For the night that Croc stays over, the first night, they have bloody filet steaks that Chato can barely afford but taste like victory. Croc mostly watches them all, from the couch, where he reigns like a lizard king sunning himself under the blue light of the television.

On the seventh night, as Digger and Floyd are packing up—Croc is long gone—Chato sits against the side of his own bed, trading swigs of pink moscato with Harley. The drink is sweet and effeminate and Chato is determined to drink at least half of it as penance for automatically scoffing when she requested it.

“Do you ever think,” she says, pulling threads one by one from the old knit blanket on her mattress, “how we could be—all of us, Rick and Katana too—if we didn’t have all this… baggage?”

Chato makes an uncertain noise.

“I mean,” Harley says, and she cracks all her fingers the way she does when she desperately wants to wriggle around but her knee won’t let her, “if we met before the murdering and the jail time. If we wasn’t wanted criminals. We could have a house like this. With more rooms. A pool for Crockie.”

She twists a thread around her fingers, dreamy, looking into a world that doesn’t exist. “Your wife and kids. Deadshot’s baby girl. Like some kinda real family.”

Chato swallows. “It’s a nice dream,” he says.

Her hand drops. “You don’t buy it,” she says.

It _is_ a beautiful dream. He can see it even now, a sprawling suburban house in a fancy neighborhood where his kids would never get shot at, two or three stories, with an endless lawn. It’s the kind of vision that Enchantress would have shown him, if she had known him as he is now.

“What’s done is done,” Chato says. He sets the wine down on the carpet beside him. “Whatever’s been done, we have to own it now, right?”

Harley looks at him. She knows he’s right, of course, but he can see the sadness in every curve of her face. She wants so many impossible, beautiful things.

“Anyways,” Chato says, “I love you _here_. You don’t gotta build me a fantasy house to make it worth my while. I love you all as you are now.”

“Broken and fucked up and everything?” Harley says, her lip twisting down as she looks away.

Beside her head, the wine jug catches the light through the curtains, and as the sun comes through the clouds for a moment it lights up like a secret diamond. She doesn’t see it. Her tangled hair is spangled with white lights, each of them bright and perfect and seen only by Chato.

“Broken and fucked up and everything,” Chato agrees.


End file.
